


the native home of hope

by Polexia_Aphrodite



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: California, F/M, Road Trips, SHIELD Agent Darcy Lewis, Tropes, Undercover, mission bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 07:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polexia_Aphrodite/pseuds/Polexia_Aphrodite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Fury brings up the opportunity to run mission support on an undercover job in San Francisco, Darcy doesn’t even care that it’ll involve hours alone in a car with Agent Barnes, she’s going to see the goddamn Pacific Ocean if it kills her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope."
> 
> -Wallace Stegner
> 
>  
> 
> This is just a little something. Hope you all like it.
> 
> For those who may be interested, I often use inspiration boards while I write, and this story's is on my Tumblr [here](http://hardboiledmeggs.tumblr.com/post/60920453001/)

Everything Darcy believes about the American West she learned in college. From the gold-hued Albert Bierstadt landscapes in her art history classes and the honest, evocative John Muir essays a literature professor forced her to read, Darcy felt the pull of it – this idea of the _West_. After a life spent inside the crowded, noisy, humid Capital Beltway (an inevitability given her father’s job on the Hill), it’s easy to buy into the idea of real freedom, and promise, and the chance to start over. 

That’s why she took the internship in New Mexico, even though she knew it was far, _far_ out of her depth as a political science major. Being under that wide-open sky, where she could see the stars, with dust under her feet and clean air in her lungs, felt right. 

But that was years ago now, and since then she’s taken a job with SHIELD that has consistently kept her circling the Atlantic – in New York City, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and to nearly every European capitol. It’s been a long time since college, but she still thinks about New Mexico, still harbors fantasies of finding herself West of the Rockies.

When Fury brings up the opportunity to run mission support on an undercover job in San Francisco, Darcy doesn’t even care that it’ll involve hours alone in a car with Agent Barnes, she’s going to see the goddamn Pacific Ocean if it kills her.

They’re posing as a married couple, a SHIELD strategy so overused that it’s become a running joke among the agents. Together they fly to Salt Lake City to rent a car. Driving it to San Francisco is meant to put a little dirt on it – just enough to make their trite honeymoon road trip story seem believable.

Like all the other undercover missions she’s been on, every detail is carefully curated – from their fake Midwest accents, to Darcy’s Daisy Dukes and Bucky’s khaki work jacket. The fifteen-year-old Taurus they pick up at a shady dealer near the airport, with its sun-faded seats and dented side, is deliberately chosen to show San Francisco how supposedly unsophisticated and unassuming they are.

They wind through the widest part of hot, barren Nevada, barely talking except to check that they have their background stories straight. Bucky drives, leaning back in his seat with one hand on the steering wheel; when she offers to take the wheel, he just shakes his head at her. Darcy slides off her shoes and props up her bare feet, with bright purple-painted toenails, on the dashboard; she keeps her eyes hidden by dark-lensed, red plastic-framed sunglasses.

It’s twilight when they cross over into California. Darcy rolls her window down. In the dim light, all she can see are the silhouettes of the giant trees that line the highway, but she can _smell_ the forest. In the dark, with the warm wind in her hair and the car rumbling hypnotically beneath her, Darcy drifts off.

They’re thirty minutes across the border, alone on the pitch-black freeway, when the car pitches and decelerates. The sudden movement startles Darcy awake. Bucky swerves to the side of the road and turns the ignition off.

He steps out of the car and digs through his duffel bag in the back seat until he finds a flashlight. His boots crunch on a bed of pine needles as he walks to the front of the car and props open the hood. Darcy tries valiantly to fall back to sleep, but tosses and turns in her seat instead. It’s only a few minutes before Bucky comes back.

“Battery’s dead.” Darcy can just barely see him in the moonlight. He shrugs and combs a hand through his hair, “Sign back there said there’s another town in ten miles. I say we wait here ‘til dawn, then start walking.”

Darcy grimaces, and pulls her cell phone out of her bag. No bars. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“’Fraid not, kiddo.”

They sit in silence for a long moment, getting used to the near-total dark, without even the glow of the dashboard.

“You cold?” he asks her, glancing down at her shorts.

With the heat of the day gone, the car’s starting to cool down. She nods.

Bucky reaches into the back seat, pulls a flannel shirt out of his duffel bag and hands it to her. Darcy pulls her bare legs up to her chest, her feet perched on the edge of the seat, and pulls the shirt around her knees, sliding her arms halfway through the sleeves.

“Thanks.”

She knows that all their clothes for this mission are borrowed, but somehow the fabric smells like him: like Old Spice and the cigarettes he’s been hand-rolling at rest stops. Darcy resists the temptation to press her nose into the shirt collar just inches away from her face. She really does.

“So where do you come from, anyway?” he glances at her, “Did Foster grow you in her lab?”

She gives him a withering look, “Alexandria. Virginia.”

“Yeah?” he draws his lower lip between his teeth, “In a split level with a white picket fence and a golden retriever?”

She shoots him a glare, but she gets that he’s trying to make conversation. She tells him about the apartment she grew up in, about her absent father and absentminded mother. Tells him how she studied political science because she didn’t know any other jobs existed. Tells him about how she’d always wanted to come out West, how many times she’d wanted to just _leave_.

She doesn’t know why she tells him so _much_ ; maybe it’s because she’s bored or because she’s tired of the quiet. Maybe it’s because sometimes it’s easier to talk in the dark. Maybe it’s because when she talks, he doesn’t seem distracted or distant – because he meets her eyes, because he smiles at her stupid one-liners and furrows his brow at all the right places.

“What about you?” she asks when she can’t think of anything more to say, “You’ve gotta be from somewhere.”

“Brooklyn by way of Moscow,” he gives her a grim smile. “Haven’t you read my file?”

Darcy frowns. “I don’t think everyone is who their file says they are.”

He looks away, his jaw clenching and unclenching.

“It’s a long story, kiddo,” he tells her at last, “Too long for tonight.”

He reaches back again, digging through his duffel bag with one hand. Maybe it’s shameless, but Darcy can’t help but watch him up close. He’s not really her type – she prefers her men tall, blond, and hunky (since Thor’s decidedly taken, she’s been mooning over Steve for months) – but there’s something magnetic about him. He’s quieter and darker than she expected, with something haunted and hunted behind his eyes. When he leans in to slide through the front seats, she feels something visceral shoot through her – something that makes her wonder what it would be like to run her fingers across the stubble on his cheek, or fist her hands in the body-warmed canvas of his jacket, or feel his mouth hot against hers.

She blinks and looks away. When he comes back up, shifting back into his seat, he’s smiling.

“Since we’ll be here a while,” he lifts a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and waggles his eyebrows at her suggestively. Darcy just laughs and shrugs.

For a long while they just sit together in silence, passing the bottle back and forth. Darcy starts to feel a pleasant, warm tingle spread through her core and limbs. 

“You know, this is how horror movies start.”

Bucky shrugs, takes a swig of whisky. He tilts his head back against the headrest, peering through his eyelashes, and passes the bottle to her. “Worst thing out here are bears. Maybe cougars.”

“Not helping.”

Alcohol usually just makes her sleepy, but, even after all the whiskey she drinks, Darcy just feels wired and twitchy. She teaches Bucky to play “Never Have I Ever,” because they have booze and time. Bucky’s done _everything_ , so when Darcy gets tired of winning (when she gets tired of thinking about all the things she _hasn’t_ done that he _has_ ), they just start asking each other questions.

They exchange stories about the best meals they’ve ever eaten, the worst lovers they’ve ever had, the most interesting people they’ve ever known. Finally, loose and relaxed, with Bucky’s flannel wrapped around her and her hand curled around the half-empty whiskey bottle, she asks the question she’s been saving up for a few rounds.

“If you had to have sex with anybody at SHIELD,” she holds up a finger, “ _or_ on the team, who would it be?”

Bucky tries to hide his dismay. They’ve been tossing questions back and forth for nearly an hour now, but he already knows the answer she’ll give when he reciprocates this one, and he doesn’t want to hear it. She’s just one of a dozen SHIELD agents who can’t stop making doe eyes at Steve. He feels sorry for them, really, because he knows better than they do that none of them will ever ( _ever_ ) be Peggy. 

He raises an eyebrow at her, determined to say the most outrageous thing he can, just to change the subject. And if it’s true, _well_. 

“I’m lookin’ at her.”

She rolls her eyes, “Ha, ha, Barnes. But seriously.”

“Not kiddin’. You think I haven’t dreamed about what it would be like to lie between those pretty thighs?” he grins at her with the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. 

She tries to scoff, but it comes out as a strangled cough. “You’re obscene,” she mutters. There’s a sudden ache between her legs that she’s determined to ignore.

“’S’why you like me.” He leers at her playfully.

She rolls her eyes, “I don’t like you; I just work with you.”

It’s just barely noticeable – if she hadn’t looked over at just the right moment, she wouldn’t have seen it – but he flinches, and she knows that what she said wasn’t what she wanted to say. It isn’t even true. She does like him, and the past few hours have been something ( _something_ ). A wave of regret hits her. 

“I don’t—I just—“ she fumbles for words, because putting her foot in her mouth is always the hardest thing to recover from.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Lewis.” His tone is sarcastic, underpinned by a hard edge. He takes a long pull from the bottle, “I didn’t get this far by caring about whether or not people liked me.”

She sputters for a moment, then makes a rash decision. What she does next, she does because she knows he’ll never believe anything she says now, and because impulsive moves are kind of her _thing_.

She pulls her arms out of the flannel and pushes it to the floor. Rising up onto her knees, she leans over the center console and over his lap, bracing herself with one hand on the car door. With her other hand tentatively placed on the side of his face, she lowers her lips to his. 

It’s just a simple, close-mouthed press, but she hopes it says what she wants it to – that she _does_ like him, that she says stupid, thoughtless stuff sometimes, and that she’s not the kind of girl who will kiss just _anybody_.

She pulls back from him, and she wishes she could see him better. In the white moonlight, she can tell that he’s looking at her, searching her face. There’s something tense in the line of his jaw. 

He jerks towards her and the sudden move surprises her, making her jerk away from him reflexively. A hesitant, awkward moment passes between them, but then Darcy just smiles, his face lightens, and she leans into him again.

This time, he kisses her back, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her across the console into his lap. He curls over her, his hands spread wide on her back, tilting her until her the crown of her head touches the cool glass of the window. Her arms wrap around his shoulders, fingers threading into his hair.

Bucky kisses her until she feels dizzy and weak. Until the ache between her legs turns into a hard throb. She has no idea what this is or where it’s going or why it’s happening, but her life has always been dotted with moments like this: spontaneous moves that change everything, at least for a little while. 

As Bucky holds her in the cramped dark car, with his hands on her ass and whiskey on his tongue, she decides that she trusts herself, trusts this (whatever it is). Because the West is a place for new beginnings, for being fearless. And she is.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I wrote a little more of this. As always, hope you all like it.

Bucky wakes up first. For nearly an hour, he lies still in the reclined driver’s seat, watching the car fill with the purple-grey light of early morning. He’s not in any great hurry to wake Darcy up and hit the road, maybe because she’s so absurdly gorgeous sleeping next to him in the pale light – all smooth skin and dark eyelashes and full lips. The sight of her, and the memory of the night before, sends a sharp pang of _something_ through him – something that goes straight to his groin and ricochets up into his chest.

It took every ounce of self-control he had, but after kissing the daylights out of her, after letting her wriggle in his lap for nearly half an hour, he managed to get her back in the passenger’s seat, so she could fall asleep curled up under his flannel with her seat back down as far as it could go. He had known that they would need at least a little rest before the walk ahead of them, but _Jesus_ it had been hard to let go of her, when all he had wanted was to bury his face in all that long, dark hair and keep his hands (even if only one of them is real) on her soft curves.

But now it’s morning, and he’s prepared if she doesn’t want to talk about it or think about it, or if she wants to pretend it didn’t happen. Or at least, he thinks he is. When her eyes finally open and she gives him a slow, sleepy smile, Bucky thinks it might break him if she pushes him away now. 

They start walking just as the day’s starting to warm up. Darcy keeps his flannel on, though, the shirttails falling just below the hem of her shorts. It’s quiet and peaceful on the road, with no cars passing and sunlight filtering through the trees.

“Hang on,” he tells her after a while, veering into the woods, away from the road.

Bucky sits on a fallen tree and pulls out rolling papers and a tin of loose tobacco from the inside pocket of his jacket. He looks up and raises his eyebrows when she sits next to him. Darcy just smiles and bumps his arm with hers. She tips her head onto his shoulder and watches him work. When he hands the first completed cigarette to her, her smile widens.

“Mmm,” she hums as she takes it between her fingers, “Good-looking _and_ generous.”

As they walk, Bucky tells her about the taiga in Russia, the thick forests and clear streams, and how untouched and spotless it looked after it was covered in a blanket of snow. He spent three months there, once, stalking a hermit the Red Room had identified as an enemy of the State. But even though he was the Winter Soldier, he was also Bucky Barnes, and he knew what beauty was.

Darcy strolls beside him, smoking her cigarette and nodding thoughtfully as he talks. She strips off the flannel once it gets too hot and ties the sleeves around her waist. She hooks her hand around his elbow, walking with him like they just popped out of a nineteenth-century novel. Bucky can’t help that his heart swells a little, just because she’s being so damn handsy with him. He doesn’t even know what he _wants_ it to mean, he just knows that he doesn’t want her to stop.

Bucky has always been a ladies’ man, in the most holistic sense of the word; time hasn’t changed that. It’s not just that he enjoys sex with women (though he really, really does) - he loves the way they talk and laugh and smell, the way they make him feel and the way he can make them feel. He truly hates to admit it, because he doesn’t know what’s waiting for them back in New York, but Darcy, with her dirty jokes and easy laugh and enormous blue eyes, is just his type.

The town they’re looking for ends up being more of a wide spot in the road, with a gas station, a Dairy Queen, and a tiny motel for road-weary travelers. It’s a stroke of luck that the gas station also houses an auto shop, and Bucky makes arrangements to have the Taurus towed and the battery replaced. 

He finds out it’ll take a day to get the new battery, so they check into the motel. The rooms are dated, but clean enough, and they’re both in desperate need of showers and snacks from the vending machine down the hall. 

Obviously, Darcy’s not just going to sit in her room by herself, so she spends most of her time in Bucky’s room. But after a few hours, watching TV turns into making out, which turns into a frantic and fruitless search through Bucky’s duffel bag for condoms, which turns into a harried trip to the gas station mini-mart. Even under the harsh, florescent lights of the tiny shop, she's beautiful – giggling, teasing him shamelessly and pulling at his belt to get his attention.

By the time they finally roll out of town, Darcy and Bucky have lost count of how many times they’ve made love – the number is lost somewhere in hours of touching and fucking, in the haze of orgasm and the weird trance she has him under. It’s been _so long_ since Bucky’s had this, and he can feel her seep into him – the slide of her skin against his, the way she handles him (like he’s _hers_ ), the dazed smile she gets right after she comes.

He wonders, after he’s kissed her and tasted her and been inside her, how she’ll look at Steve when they get back – if she’ll give him the same wistful, pining glances she always has. A not-small part of him hopes she won’t look at him at all.

They manage to get ahold of Fury, who cancels their mission. At this rate, they’ll get to San Francisco too late, and the mission is too important, so he sends Steve and Natasha out instead. Darcy looks crushed when she gets the news, so Bucky tells her they’re going AWOL.

He drives them across the state, past cities and towns and wide-open farmlands. When they get to the Redwoods, Darcy makes Bucky pull over three times, just so they can run their hands over rough bark and stare up at the canopy hundreds of feet above them. She hands him her phone, and makes him take photos of her with her arms stretched around the impossibly wide trunks, until he gets a shot that’s good enough for Facebook.

It’s dark when they get to Crescent City. The hotel they check into is overrun with tourists and crawling with swimsuit-clad children. When they enter the lobby, Darcy tells him they might as well just get one room, and it makes Bucky smirk at her and sling an arm around her shoulders as they walk to the front desk.

Despite the fact that their room is “ocean view,” everything out their window is just black emptiness, with a few dim lights on the horizon. But Darcy opens the windows wide, and they fall asleep to the sound of waves, with Bucky’s arms around her and her face nuzzled against his naked chest.

The next morning, Bucky wakes up alone, but a quick glance out the window tells him that Darcy’s already on the beach. He picks up two Styrofoam cups of coffee in the lobby and heads out to catch up with her.

The beach is empty, save for a few early-morning walkers. It’s chilly, and a dense fog bank covers the blue-grey expanse before them. Darcy’s standing barefoot just where the sand turns from dry to wet, with her shorts on and his flannel wrapped tight around her, looking out at the whitecaps. Her hair’s a mess, wind-tossed and covered in misty water droplets.

As he comes up behind her, she turns to him when she hears his boots squelching in the sandy muck. Darcy takes the coffee gratefully, curling her fingers around the warm cup. Bucky steps behind her, wraps his arms around her waist, and hooks his chin on her shoulder, his own coffee cup dangling from one hand.

“Well, kiddo. Finally got your ocean,” he murmurs near her ear, and she smiles and sips her coffee. “What’re you thinkin’?”

She shrugs and leans into him, her head tilting back against his shoulder.

“Nothing. I'm just happy.”

Bucky turns his head, hiding a smile against the side of her neck. Whatever happens when they get back to New York, he knows that, at least in this moment, he is, too.


End file.
